


man-made lake

by HATECADILLAC



Category: Bill & Ted (Movies)
Genre: Extended Metaphors, Friends to Lovers, Getting Together, Homophobic Language, Late Night Conversations, Lesbian Character, Love Confessions, M/M, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Period-Typical Homophobia, Philosophy, Pining, Post-Break Up, Present Tense, Sexuality Crisis, Swimming, Teen Romance, Teenage Drama, Yuletide 2020, extremely outdated developmental psychology lol, first yuletide here we GOOOOOOOO, we're gonna call this one ambiguously between excellent adventure and bogus journey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2020-11-11
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:54:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27504148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HATECADILLAC/pseuds/HATECADILLAC
Summary: After getting most egregiously dumped, Bill and Ted drive out to the man-made lake.
Relationships: Ted "Theodore" Logan/Bill S. Preston Esq.
Comments: 30
Kudos: 68
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	man-made lake

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gothyringwald](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gothyringwald/gifts).



> THANK U for suggesting the idea of them breaking up w elizabeth and joanna in ur letter because i now have an excuse to engage in Lesbian Princess Indulgence

Ted can’t remember the last time he’s seen Bill cry—can’t remember if he’s _ever_ seen him cry, now that he’s thinking about it on top of the lights along the side of the highway and Poison on the radio. But as they pass under one particularly bright one it illuminates the slimy tear track down Bill’s cheek, obvious sign where he has his knees up to his chest in the passenger's side staring pointedly out the window. So it’s serious, then. Ted grips the steering wheel harder and keeps driving.

He’s not as upset about _the situation_ —what they’ve taken to calling it, to avoid opening up that raw wound any further—as Bill is, which creates an odd dynamic that Ted doesn’t quite know how to navigate. Perhaps because he’d seen the writing on the wall, so to speak: he’d been the one who shaved Elizabeth’s head. And that had been after a month or so of lending her clothes, two months of listening to Joan Jett records with her and Joanna in the garage after band practice. Even before that, he’d gotten the sense that they were dating more in theory than in practice. Holding hands sometimes, kissing once, but mostly just hanging out together—regular old friendship with a strange context looming over it, an unwieldy burden. Ted probably worked out what was happening before she did, to be honest.

He recalls distantly the conversation they’d had right after he did it, while she was still sitting on the bathroom counter and running her hands over her newly buzzed scalp as Ted idly began sweeping her hair off the floor:

“Couple of guys at the mall called me and Joanna dykes yesterday.”

“Oh, bogus. That really sucks.”

“Why does it suck? What’s that word mean?”

“Uh—it’s just rude. It means, like, they thought you were lesbians. Probably just ‘cuz how you’re dressed and stuff—”

“What’s lesbians?”

That had made Ted laugh, and feel bad for laughing—felt bad the second he saw her face, that she was serious. Even now, there were still things she and Joanna were learning about the world of 1990.

“Well, it’s like—when you’re a chick, but you wanna date and do stuff with other chicks, and not guys.”

“That’s a thing?”

“Yeah. Probably was back then too but people didn’t talk about it. People don’t really talk about it that much now, either...but it’s a thing. Totally.”

“Huh.”

She was quiet for a long, long time. When Ted was done cleaning up, and stood up to meet eyes with Elizabeth, that same serious look was cemented on her face like it might not leave for some time.

“I’m really sorry, Theodore. I think you’re a cool guy. I really do.”

She didn’t elaborate. It was one of the few times in Ted’s life that he felt, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he had successfully put two and two together.

Bill and Joanna must have had some version of that interaction, too, though Ted doesn’t know exactly how it went down; the princesses did very few things separately, but breaking up with the two of them had been one of those very few things. It feels strange not knowing something like that, that despite how inseparable they are there is a formative experience they don’t share. One of only two things unshared between the two of them—the other of which Ted doesn't know how or when or _if_ he’ll ever share. It rears its ugly head now, unexpectedly at how artsy and maybe-sort-of-pretty Bill looks with the light spilling bright over him in rhythmic bursts through the car window.

_He’s so sad about it, which means he’s probably not...and he’ll see that I’m not as sad about it, and he’ll think that I’m…_

_That_ ’ _s_ serious, too. Ted grips the steering wheel harder and keeps driving.

They’re headed to the man-made lake, because they don’t know what else to do. It has a name, but no one ever calls it by whatever that name might be, and Ted can’t recall it even if he tries. It’s never just the lake, too; always the man-made lake, like there’s some great power in the fact that it had been built and not found. Ted hasn’t been since before he and Bill met, on a distantly remembered elementary school field trip, but he knows from word-of-mouth it’s a place other San Dimas High students ‘hang out’—used euphemistically here, of course, to mean getting drunk or high and hooking up with each other. Maybe that’s the appeal, in the end: the draw of some profoundly teenage space for what seemed like a profoundly teenage situation. It just feels like the kind of thing they would do if they were characters in one of those John Hughes movies or something, the cinematic approach to shitty feelings.

It’s maybe an hour and a half out from San Dimas, sun setting when they had pulled out of Ted’s driveway and fully down now that they’re pulling into the empty parking lot adjacent to the man-made lake. That whole hour and a half they don’t speak to each other, probably the longest silence they’ve spent together that either party can remember. Even as they file out of the car, the only sound between them is the slamming of doors shut almost in unison that ring out echoing through the vacant lot. It’s a Tuesday night, which maybe explains the ghost-town nature of the space, but it still unnerves Ted on some benign, domestic level.

Close but not quite hand-in-hand, they walk to the very edge of the man-made shore of the man-made lake, and Ted turns his head towards Bill the same time Bill turns his head towards Ted and says the first words for either of them in nearly two hours.

“I fucked up, dude. I didn’t bring a swimsuit or anything.” He isn't crying anymore, but his voice is still thick and nervous with the too-recent memory of it.

“Me neither. Guess I fucked up too.” Ted falters a little in the face of reassurance, giving a vague smile that Bill returns on a well-worn instinct. “Not that big a deal, man...we can just swim in our underwear or something. Not like anyone’s even here, anyway.” For a second his mind floats towards skinny-dipping, but that pushes the boundary of the thing too hard for comfort—too risky. Ted swallows hard and hopes Bill doesn’t notice.

Silent again and in unison, they pull off their clothes and ball them up to throw haphazardly into the sand. It’ll be a bitch to have to put them on again, probably, but that doesn’t matter in the moment. Ted means to turn away to do it, but hesitates too long waiting for Bill to turn first, so when he doesn’t they face each other as they undress and flirt with the idea of making eye contact. That makes Ted get nervous in service of the thing—but it’s okay, maybe, if Bill does it first. At the very least, it doesn’t matter now, in the face of everything.

Ted still doesn’t know how to feel about it, even with all that time driving to himself to work it out. The closest word he can scramble for is _dreamlike_ ; as though in a dream state he were floating through everything, unaffected and unaffecting, melancholy maybe but not sad. If sad, sad for Elizabeth, who had returned to school earlier today to find the same word that she had been called at the mall scribbled hastily on her locker. She had cried, then, he remembered. It had to feel different knowing what it meant, and knowing it was you. Elizabeth had cried, Bill had cried, and maybe Joanna had cried too, at some point—but Ted had not. Not yet, anyway, or not consciously; two nights before he’d woken gasping to find his pillow wet with tears, like he’d wept through the night unawares. The most tangible thing he can understand he feels is, aside from the shame he holds for feeling it...a sort of _relief_. A release from what felt like performance, finally going offstage after so much recitation and monologuing in the role of _boyfriend_. Relief that blends, in fits and starts, with fear; fear now that he’s been let loose, that there is no comfortable narrative he can sink into and distract himself with. A fear of change, alongside the unshakeable reality that things had changed and would change.

He doesn’t know how to say any of this, not even to Bill, to whom he’s used to being able to say anything. His stupid mouth bypasses it all to opt something that barely scrapes the surface, distracting and maybe even a little mean: “So. Joanna too, huh.”

“Huh?” Bill’s turned to face the man-made lake by the time Ted gathers his thoughts enough to speak, gazing over its surface in what Ted thinks makes him look like some Romantic painting dude looking thoughtfully at some vast landscape. He doesn’t turn back to answer, and Ted’s eyes dip down past where he’s consciously glued them to above Bill’s shoulders—selfishly feeding the thing on the sight of his bare chest, the spot visible under his crop top now in full context. “Oh...yeah. How’d you know, dude?”

Well, Ted knows because he’s been lending _Joanna_ clothes this whole time, too—and she’d buzzed her head herself, though by now it had grown back into a scruffy mess threatening a mullet. He’s starting to get the feeling he’s more in touch with this sort of thing than Bill was, and reminds himself why with a wry sort of nausea that boils defanged in his stomach. “Intuition, man. I’ve got the Gift,” he jokes mostly for his own sake, but it makes Bill laugh in a dry, hesitant sound.

“Kinda weird...that they’d both be, I mean. Some coincidence.” Unconsciously, they both avoid the word.

“Yeah, guess so,” Ted sighs more than speaks, noncommittal. In the dark he can primarily make out only the shape of Bill, details lost—there’s something about that that makes his heart skip a little, their existence together in shadow. He’s reminded they are alone, and shivers in the rapidly cooling night air. “I dunno. It kinda makes sense to me.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, yeah.” 

Well, not exactly—it makes sense to Ted not in the realm of logic but in feeling, _feels_ right. But something about the energy of the man-made lake, their presence alone on it, the night wind that’s ruffling Bill’s hair and pushing his own into his eyes, puts feeling somewhere strange and unpredictable, unmanageable. There’s something he wants to say and cannot say; he knew that already, but now he fears he might end up saying it anyway.

“I mean, to me I think it’s sort of...you know nature and nurture, that whole debate. I don’t know which one it is for stuff like that, but...if you take nature they’re sisters, so they have the same genes from their mom and dad and everything. And for nurture, they were raised together, yeah? So whichever you think it is you got, like, supporting evidence. If that’s even what—what determines it, I guess. I dunno. I’m just goin’ off the top of my head here.”

It feels stupid and clunky and worst of all _fake_ falling out of Ted’s mouth, but Bill closes his eyes and thinks about it. His shoulders settle from some unrealized tension, and he sniffles a little before he speaks again, the sound surprisingly loud and obtrusive.

“You’re, like, really smart, dude.”

“Nah—”

“No, for real! You always just know how to make sense out of stuff. Even stuff like this.” There’s something shallow to how upbeat it is, fizzling out as Bill’s head drops and he becomes suddenly very interested in the sand and gravel near his feet. The grimace that’s been threatening on Ted’s face finally takes root.

“Still bummed out?”

“Yeah,” Bill sighs; he isn’t crying again, but could be close to it. “Man...I dunno _how_ you’re taking this so well, dude. I feel totally _heinous_.”

Ted has an inkling of how he’s taking it so well, sure he does. He bites his tongue on that one, taking guilty note of every time he does it, a number increasing now more rapidly than ever before. “It’s okay, man. Feel what you feel. It’s a bogus situation all around.”

“But, like, it’d be different if I had _done_ something,” Bill continues, words spilling out fast now that some imperceptible dam seems to have been broken. “You know, if I pissed her off or something. I could _own_ that. But like this it’s like…” He puts his hands up ready for some defining gesture to make his point, but it eludes him, and they hover tense in the air before he swallows hard and speaks again. “Like it’s the _universe_ that dumped me, dude. There isn’t anything I can do about it. Just stand here and be alive while things change.” He grimaces hard, brings one hand to idly to his face while the other drops dead and limp by his side. “I bet I sound like the biggest asshole on the planet right now, huh.”

“I mean, you respect her, obviously, right?”

“Obviously.”

“Then no problem. Even if she doesn’t wanna date you anymore I’m sure she still thinks you’re cool. That’s how it was with me and Elizabeth...so if you’re worried about, like, things changing with the band or anything, I’m certain that we will be able to maintain the most excellent of friendships with the princesses.”

“But I don’t exactly know that that’s what I _want_ , Ted,” Bill refutes. “I sort of want things to be back to the way they were.”

“I don’t think things _can_ go back to the way they were, dude. That’s just part of life. Stuff changes whether we like it or not...you just gotta go along with it or else you’re gonna feel bad all the time.”

“Bogus.”

“No, man, not always. Like, think of all the _good_ changes that’ve happened to us recently.”

“Like what?”

“Well...we’re not flunking history anymore. We’ve got instruments and a real _band_ and everything. And just think about the _princesses,_ man, like, how crazy must all this change be for them? They’re in a whole new _century_. I don’t even know how they’re able to not go totally insane every time they look at a microwave or a TV or something. And this is a change for _them_ too...it’s a _good_ change. Think about how much happier they’re gonna be now that they figured that out. Even if it’s scary it must feel good to realize something like that and know it for certain instead of being totally confused.”

_Not like I know from experience. Come on, man, I don’t know from experience, we’re cool, right?_

Bill thinks about this for a long time, and for a long time there’s silence between them, unfamiliar and hard to navigate. They’re close enough to the edge of the water that if there were waves they would lap at their feet—if they were somewhere natural, like the ocean. But they’re at the edge of this man-made lake, which is so still and placid in contrast to everything threatening to crash hard in Ted’s brain, and they’re completely dry despite their expectant undressing. That feels wrong to Ted—there’s some need to be soaked to the bone in a moment like this, metaphor floating half-baked in the periphery of his thoughts. 

The silence breaks with an exhale from Bill that lands heavier than it looks, lilting at the end and becoming half a step away from laughter. “Yeah, you’re right, dude,” he concedes. “It feels a little better...thinking about it like that.”

Ted grins, having won—but it’s a hollow victory, in the absence of the thing he can identify and cannot speak. In the face of Bill’s laugh and the eased tension of his shoulders dropping, in the face of that on top of everything, the thing seems to churn him more completely than he’s ever been churned by it before.

“No problem, dude. I really care about you and it’s totally bogus to see you so upset. I wanna be able to make you feel better however I can.”

_That’s not the thing. I can say that. It’s okay to say that because we’re friends. Because we’re best friends—_

“You _do_ make me feel better. Seriously. I dunno _how_ I’d be able to get through any of this if I was just in my room alone or something. I’m glad we drove out here.” Bill falters a little at the end of it, caught off guard by the emotion that seems to sneak up from behind and put both hands on his shoulders. “So. Yeah.”

“Yeah!”

“Still sucks, though,” Bill eases into the feeling, having grappled with it enough to solidify it into one general phrase like that. “It was cool having girlfriends even if we never really did anything with ‘em.”

“You’ll get another girlfriend, dude,” Ted assures and realizes too late that he left himself out of the sentence. He’s too caught up in the moment for the thing to bite him—too _here_ , with _Bill_. That scares him, distantly, that it might spiral too far away from him to keep managing. “You’re a total chick magnet.”

“I dunno, man,” Bill laughs off. “Sure doesn’t _feel_ like it.”

“Things’ll be different soon. We’re graduating this year...and then we’ll get out of San Dimas. We’ll go wherever we want instead. And none of this shitty stuff is gonna matter anymore—none of these people we go to high school with, none of our parents—it’s just gonna be me and you and Joanna and Elizabeth and the _music_. We’re gonna be in the _band_. That’s what’s gonna make it, despite everything. No matter what happens.”

It pinches some nerve in the back of Ted’s throat, and his voice runs out—he lost the thought, caught up in everything he felt and everything struggling inside himself to be expressed without being said. And Bill _has_ to know now, but when Ted searches his face for confusion or disgust he’s frightened to find he can’t read the look on the face of the one person he knows better than anyone else. Some obscure emotion, scored by the even rise and fall of his chest and the drying tears on his cheeks, a look that files itself away forever in some fundamental memory box and cannot for a second be understood. Like he’s half a step away from _getting it_ , the way Ted is half a step past the same thing—filling in the gap between them. His heart flutters.

Ted looks down the same time Bill looks up, and they make eye contact all at once too intense to look away from. Somewhere in the last—how many minutes? It eludes Ted, and doesn’t seem to matter—they’ve stepped closer together, and Ted thinks if he looked long enough he could count Bill’s eyelashes from here. He’d like to do that, distantly, in another time or place. For now they’re close, closer than before, and the thing cracks an egg over Ted’s head and makes him shiver in place. He realizes, stupidly, he never finished that strange and revealing thought that nearly made him cry just to suggest, raw. He ends it remembering what’s happening, the context he’s starting to flounder in: “...And we’re gonna have babes crawling all over us once our first album drops. Just you wait and see.”

It’s nonsense, meaningless. Ted knows this, is nauseated by how profoundly he knows this, but Bill’s head jerks just slightly like he’s swallowing it before he turns and looks back at the man-made lake. Ted can’t bring himself to do the same; he keeps looking at the lines of Bill’s nose and jaw in the dark, at his collarbone, at the acne scars scattered on his shoulder. The body he knows like his own, belonging to the boy who might as well be another part of him for how intertwined they are, how inseparable.

“You really think so?” Bill says to the man-made lake.

“Yeah, man. I do.”

Then Bill looks over his shoulder at Ted and the spell is broken—some great fog lifting everywhere but the inside of Ted’s skull, returning to normal. It was stupid to think there was some great weight to that, that for a moment there they had accessed something between themselves that they could understand without words. But there’s still something on Bill’s face, in his eyes specifically maybe, that keeps Ted’s breath caught high at the top of his throat. More than anything in the world he wishes he could read Bill’s mind literally instead of the way they joke about—maybe just as much as he wishes Bill could read his, so there was a way to exorcise the thing without ever having to put it into words.

“Wanna go in?” Bill asks too plainly for what feels like such a great undertaking, gaze leaving Ted and craning upwards towards the rock formation looming over the man-made lake. Ted opens his mouth and can’t speak—nods instead, and walks behind him, watching the back of his head more intently than he’s ever watched anything before.

Ted doesn’t know if the rock formation is man-made, too, but it seems to line up perfectly with the surface of the water, ideal for diving down into the deepest part of it. He wants so badly for it to be natural, for them to have built the man-made lake around it some long time ago, but he doesn’t know how to find that out, who to ask. In any case, he and Bill look down at the water together and contemplate it once they make the climb up, toes at the edge. It will be so cold when they finally plunge in, colder than it already is shivering in their underwear and looking from what feels like an impossible height. But they have to do it—Ted _wants_ to do it.

“Hey, Ted,” Bill’s voice comes from a great distance, despite him standing close enough that they could hold hands in another time or place. He keeps his eyes trained on the surface of the man-made lake. “What do you want?”

“Like, in general?”

“I guess so, yeah.”

Ted knows what he wants but can’t say it. He looks down at the man-made lake, imagines the near future of his body breaking that stillness, generates the next best thing.

“I guess...I wanna be a self-made man. Whatever that means. Kind of like what you said earlier about—about being able to _own_ something. Being responsible for it. Whatever I am I want it to be on _purpose_.”

He turns to Bill flighty and exposed, on the verge of tears and unable to explain why. “How about you?”

But after Bill’s done thinking about it, shivering and staring the man-made lake down, he answers by taking three big steps back and running into a flying leap off the edge of the rock formation. Ted watches as his body gets smaller and smaller, flinches empathetically when he splashes into the water like its his own skin fully submerged.

What else is there left to do? Ted closes his eyes and follows suit, thinking of nothing, feeling more than he can understand.

He hits the water far sooner than he expects to, and it’s more shockingly cold than he could have anticipated—immediately soaking into his bones and making him tense up. There’s one second where he thinks to himself _hey, what if I die,_ because that happens sometimes, right? When you jump into water that’s too cold, that’s too much? Pure terror fills him for that second, terror and embarrassment and regret—but then he gets used to it. The cold goes away, or becomes enough part of his body that he feels more at home in it than out. The water cradles him, protecting him, the incomprehensible power of the man-made lake all around him and unseeable. Suspended in its space, beloved visitor, he curls fetal into himself and begins to understand.

So, yeah, maybe the princesses aren’t the only ones who are a little gay nowadays. Ted didn’t have any particular moment in which he realized the way he felt about Bill wasn’t completely within the bounds of a most excellent friendship between two totally straight dudes—it just short of dawned on him slowly, imperceptible until all at once it was too strong to ignore. Maybe it had always been there; the idea of that comforts Ted at the same time it scares him. Right, it scares him, just a little. Why wouldn’t it? San Dimas is a small town. No one talks about it. It’s unknowable. Not like Ted knows any other gay people—well, _didn’t_ know until recently, but the reception Joanna and Elizabeth have gotten so far isn’t exactly making him want to shout it to the heavens. And the thought of how his dad would react is too heinous to even think about for too long without this nauseous sort of dread sinking deep into his body.

But all of that would be fine if he knew how Bill would feel about it. That’s the thing. It’s _the thing_ , the sum of it all that made this wedge take root and stay. It’s not as though it’s out of the sphere of their friendship; they’ve been called practically every variation on it in the book, inseparable and occasionally crop-top wearing as they are. It was easy to laugh off at first, a big joke until to Ted it wasn’t. It started to worm a hole in him, small but unavoidable, always itching. But there was no way he could breach the topic, no word he could use that his brain didn’t recoil from. There is no word for this. Like a microcosm of the outside world, _their_ world leaves the thing just as unperturbed, unspoken of. Ted lived like that every day, and it stacked on his shoulders, and by the time he started to wheeze under its weight it was too late to learn what to do about it.

For so long this went unvisualized, little but the occasionally painful sum of synapses firing in patterns predetermined. There was so much that could not be condensed into one thought, into one idea. But the man-made lake works whatever sway it holds over the lives of lonely teenage queers, and Ted _gets it_. He stays under as long as he can until his lungs start to protest, and when he surfaces he gasps like he’s once again emerging from the womb.

In his immersion he had drifted, unknowingly, closer to shore—where he is now he can stand on the bottom of the man-made lake, the water coming mid-chest. When he opens his eyes again he wants to look around to see if the scenery is any different now, considering everything, but what immediately fills his field of vision is _Bill_. Standing immediately in front of him, having drifted to the same place in his separate and unknowable moment under the water—they had come together naturally.

Ted says it more easily than he’s ever said anything before, the words falling from his lips light as air.

“Bill—I love you.”

“Wh—” it takes him a second to hear, but then he smiles vaguely, at ease. “Oh, I love you too, dude.”

Ted grimaces, but knows he can’t risk being misunderstood—not now, not here. “No, man—I mean in like a gay way.” Even under the lingering chill of the water dripping down his cheeks, he feels them heat up. 

“Oh.” Bill blinks once, twice. “Really?”

“Yeah, really.”

The smiles leaves at the corners of Bill’s mouth as something half past confusion takes over. Ted swallows hard.

“I’m sorry, dude.”

“Why sorry?”

There’s something different in Bill’s voice—contemplative and obscured, kept to himself. Now it’s Ted’s turn to be confused, hand curling at his side as his fingers run over each other in a fidgeting habit. The question throws him off his train of thought, and he scrabbles for what to say. “Sorry for—for being a fag, I guess. About you,” he eventually comes up with, feeling as stupid and debased as the words sound coming out of his mouth. Tears sting the corners of his eyes, to call himself that out loud for the first time, and he’s selfishly glad for how drenched he is to hide his shame.

“What if I was too?”

“Huh?”

“What if I was one too, dude?” Bill looks up from where his gaze had drifted down to the water, looks Ted dead in the eye as his voice starts to waver—like he might cry (might cry _too_ ). “Would you still be sorry?”

Ted knows there’s no way he can be understanding this right, but his heart still jumps in his chest like Bill means what he thinks he means. He takes a step back that’s only perceptible through how it disturbs the water around him. “I’m not following, Bill. Are you saying you’re—”

“I dunno what I’m saying,” Bill cuts in, so vulnerable it makes Ted ache by association. “I dunno. I think about it a lot. I didn’t know what to do...I just ignored it...it was easy before. I thought it might go away. But without her I can’t ignore it anymore. I’ve been so freaked out these last couple of days—” His voice catches on a sniffle, high in his throat.

“It’s okay, man—it’s okay—” Ted tries to reassure, stunned into submission by how completely they mirror each other, even now, like this. He wants so badly to hug him and doesn’t know if he’s allowed to; they’re in new territory, strange and far from each other despite how much closer this scary and wonderful change had brought them. “I am too. _I am too_ , dude.” It means more than it sounds, and he hopes Bill understands him more than he’s ever hoped for anything before.

“I just like you—” Bill starts and then starts over. “— _love_ you so much, man. I dunno what it means beyond that. I don’t have the words. I dunno if I’m even—” he loses that one, skipping over the word both of them think in unison. He only speaks again once he shivers from a cold that has nothing to do with the environment. “I just _feel_ so much. For you and about you. You’re my _best friend..._ but…”

“But it’s more than that,” Ted finishes the thought silently. After all, they mirror each other, now and forever.

“Yeah. Maybe it’s always been. I don’t know what to think...what to _do_...It’s so much—” He punctuates his wavering ramble with a harsh laugh, forced out of himself. “We’re _totally_ queers, dude. All those guys were right. Every time we’ve been—been pushed into a locker or gotten our gym clothes stolen that was _true_ , they were _right_ —”

Ted can’t see Bill’s tears through all the water that’s still dripping off of him and plastering his curly hair down straight, but he watches his face contort with it, unavoidably. Then he’s crying too, set off by the sight alone—how raw he already is, ripped open, in front of his weeping mirror mirroring just the same.

“Dude— _Bill_ —”

And then of course he’s wading the half-step he needs to close the gap between them, unsure of how he managed to go this long this far away. They’ve hugged before but never _ever_ like this, first touch in a new context as they all but try to fuse into each other. Ted can’t remember being this close before, to anyone. It dominates his senses completely, shutting his eyes as he feels Bill’s cold wet skin against his own in an experience he would have imagined being unpleasant any other time in his life. His head falls comfortably into the crook of Bill’s neck and patches over their height difference as naturally as though their bodies had been built to interlock. All they do is breathe—Ted feels Bill’s chest rising and falling, first shallow and nervous before he moves into the kind of slow rhythm Ted imagines he must take on when he sleeps. They don’t separate until they’re breathing in sync.

Their faces are so close to each other, and for a second Ted thinks they might kiss—that feels like way too much, frightening and fascinating. They’ll have time for that later, time for everything. In the meantime they stand like that, noses touching, and it’s beyond close enough. Ted can’t bring himself to take his hands off of Bill completely, keeping his hands on his shoulders.

“What are we gonna do?” Bill whispers on instinct from how close they are. Something about it, about _everything_ , at once seems to flush his system of all toxins, leaching out into the water and rippling away from him in the small disturbances his anxious body produces on the surface. All that remains is soft and manageable, more weight off his shoulders than he can fully comprehend in the moment.

“Anything, dude—anything—we don’t have to do anything—”

It’s nonsense, but it doesn’t have to be more as Ted leans forward and closes the impossibly small gap between the two of them once again. That means the most, in the end.

Reborn an idiot in love by the awesome power of the man-made lake, Ted presses his lips to Bill’s temple and tastes salt there. They stand in stasis, holding each other there in the water, until the night wind dries them off and leaves not chill but an unexpected warmth that will stay for some time longer.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you like this!! I've literally never done an exchange before so hopefully this turned out alright haha  
> I also went a little overboard and made a [playlist (+ cover art) for this thing](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7FFE96GwggtTQqRej9jEDT?si=EN0w7JNXTfinH0XNXNhHeA) with the general Vibez sound-wise i was going for hehe


End file.
